/r/Games is for informative and interesting gaming content and discussions. Please look over our rules and FAQ before posting. If you're looking for "lighter" gaming-related entertainment, try /r/gaming!

The goal of /r/Games is to provide a place for informative and interesting gaming content and discussions. Submissions should be for the purpose of informing or initiating a discussion, not just with the goal of entertaining viewers.

Promotion

Some promotional submitting (posting your own projects, articles, etc.) is permitted, but it must be balanced out by a much greater level of non-promotion participation in reddit - the rule of thumb is no more than 10% of your submissions may be promotional. Do not solicit votes for your posts. For more information, see the self-promotion on reddit FAQ.

If you want to promote without participating in the community, purchase an ad.

Spoilers

Please report posts containing spoilers unless they are hidden using the following method or are inside a thread clearly labeled as containing spoilers.

I hope I can explain the tech being showcased. A lot of it is literally the first time it's been implemented in a gaming engine. I've simplified some of the language to help understanding. I've also put times in reference to the youtube video above to show examples. Also, this video shows all the technology shown in the OP's video, but cinematically and all. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWvgETOo5ek

First he talks about the editor being "What you see is what you play." Basically, once you've put down your 3D models and configured the lighting you can go immediately in game and see exactly what a player would see. What's the big deal you might ask? Well in other engines like Unreal Engine 3 and Source, you have to "bake" the lighting, to get the visual quality that is being showcased here. Baking takes hours and is static, hence why Unreal Engine 4, a competitor of CryEngine 3 is moving to this "WYSIWYP" type of editor. Baking is cumbersome because the artist has no idea what the overall atmosphere will look like, until he's baked the scene, which is a big negative.

He also talks about the cloth being optimized and easier to work with. This is a plus, since you can put more in the game and it's easier to do so.

4.33. Pixel Accurate Displacement Mapping is also introduced. This is a big one. In the past, if you wanted tiny details like rocks and bumps on the tree in the video, you have only one real choice. Bumpmapping. Then we have tessellation. You can see the differences in this picture: The last picture is actually Tessellation. http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/91797/model_comparision.jpg

Bumpmapping was used because PCs were too weak to have millions of polygons to make up tiny details. Now we have much stronger PCs and can start to use tessellation. But tessellation is also performance intensive as well. The 2nd sphere with bumpmapping in the picture above had details, but they were flat and the silhouette was still round. The 3rd sphere with tessellation had details and wasn't round, but needed millions of polygons, something we don't need. So in comes PADM, which is basically a more efficient version of tessellation (the 3rd sphere) to my understanding.

P.S To be more accurate PADM is actually a more advanced version of Parallax Occulsion Mapping, which is shown in the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcAsJdo7dME
The downside of POM is that when you are at shallow angles against the surface, it screws up and fails to work. PADM fixes this limitation.

6.58. He also talks about the new flares system. It is now a replica of what a real camera sees when it faces a bright light. Cameras have several lenses, and so the engine can now emulate these lenses and give us realistic lens flare. To the people who question the need for such lens flare, it's definitely annoying when overused, but it is completely optional and can be subtle as well. Not to mention that games are definitely moving towards the visual styling of films, rather than photorealism which is boring IMO.

9.40. Screen Space Reflections. Normally in games, reflections are hard to handle due to advances in technology (weird I know). Older games were simpler, using a forward renderer, and that is why you have mirrors in Duke Nukem. But recently, games started using a more efficient and hacky technique, that allowed much better lighting but removed the ability to have proper reflections using existing techniques. As a result some games use cubemaps which don't provide a realistic representation of a scene, but look reflective enough to give us the illusion. Crytek has invented a technique that takes what is above the water surface on the screen, and projected it onto the water to give us realistic reflections and not fake cube maps. But what happens when we look into the water at a steep angle and see nothing above it? We can't get any info about what is above it, since this technique uses what is on the screen. Cubemaps are then used to give an approximation. Crytek just blended the two techniques.

10.34. Real water caustics. You know when you looks into a pool and see these ripples of white focused light? Those are caustics and give great atmosphere to a game. Too bad ALL games use a fake texture to stimulate this effect like here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyKahyg_uZI

Crytek does this properly, like a ray tracer would. This is incredibly impressive as it takes hours for a ray tracer to do it properly. Here is a pre-rendered example that took hours to minutes "50 HOURS" to render. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwjQk7dJOFQ
Obviously in CE3 it's not on the same level as the ray tracer but it is realistic and done properly in REAL-TIME.

15.20 Area Lights. In the vast majority of games, a light is just a perfect sphere lighting everything around it. Some times it's a texture projected on a surface. Here we have area lights. Think of a TV showing a white picture. The light it casts isn't just a single perfect sphere. It's a rectangle projecting outwards. This is what ray tracers do in minutes. Now this is what CryEngine does in real time. Additionally, if the light source is quite big, then the shadows will be blurry. In games, shadows are pin sharp and then all blurred to the same extent, which is obviously inaccurate. CryEngine 3 determines the penumbra and the blurriness according to the distance from the light source and its size, like in real life. Yet again this would take minutes to render in a ray tracer.

18.40 Volume Shadows. God rays in all other games are fake. They only show when you look into the sun, or another light source and disappear if you look away. It looks pretty, but it could look even better if they made it physically accurate. This video is an example of the fake god rays in all games made to date. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Loya_S7wxIk

What CE3 does is actually pass shadows through smoke and fog, until it hits the ground. This is much more different than casting a shadow onto, say a table, because you have to cast a 3D shadow continuously through a volume like fog. Basically it looks a lot better and more atmospheric.

21.26 Vegetation bending. When you walk through plants in real life they brush apart to make way for you. Wind also blows them one way. Too bad most games don't do this, preferring to have them wave gently side to side. Others try to do realistic vegetation bending but settle with the plant weirdly stretching as something moves into it, like Max Payne 3. CryEngine does do proper vegetation bending and it makes vegetation feel alive. Each leaf and branch is physically modelled and can be blown around or even shot off.

Explosions blow plants apart. Helicopters blow them around, and tall grass ominously shifts as someone or something moves through it. This aspect is actually used in the gameplay of Crysis 3, from what I've seen in the trailers. This tech is definitely not new, but you should note that Crysis 1 was the first game to have this impressive tech, until other engines caught on. It still has the best implementation but was cumbersome to get working, and performance intensive. CryEngine 3 makes it easier to do and you can do more of it.

Pixel Accurate Displacement Mapping is really what blows my mind the most because it just fixes so many issues polygon rendering had. And it's not just displacements, it's a shader on a "flat" surface.

But caustics and area lights, while more subtle and niche, are amazing additions as well. This is really a very modern and smart engine. I'm seeing photorealism with the compromises so elegantly hidden, they can be almost completely ignored. Some of those areas look more alive than Pixar sceneries.

To give a quick comparison of the competition, as far as we know the first, second, third, sixth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth/fourteenth bulletins are all features that Epic has been working on and wants to implement in Unreal Engine 4 (a couple are already present in UE3).

As a side-note, displacement mapping isn't necessarily a replacement for tessellation, and would likely be used on different assets in the same level. Tessellation, as far as I recall, isn't as process-intensive as displacement mapping (correct me if I'm wrong), but who knows what technical wizardry they might have developed to get it in and out of the frame buffer quickly.

As the guy says in the original video, whether you use displacement mapping or tessellation really comes down to what performance limits you're hitting in a given scene. If you've got lots of polygons to spare (i.e, not as many draw calls due to limited geometry), then tessellation can be more performant. If, however, you're maxing your polygon count but have less overhead in terms of shader performance, then displacement mapping will be more suitable.

As you say, one isn't a replacement for the other, but the effects are similar enough that it's nice to have more options available to artists.

Thanks for the reminder! I forgot displacement maps were a shader, I've never had the opportunity to use one. Besides, I'm knowledgeable, but no expert in a lot of the newfangled tricks that engines use these days.

It should be noted that some of these are already done by existing engines/games. For example Doom 3 had a "wysiwyp" editor embedded in the game (the whole point about Doom 3's lighting was to avoid baking).

FEAR 1 had both volumetric lights and area lighting (with low resolution results though... and i think we're about the tech level that they're now smoothly playable :-P). Hellgate: London actually was one of the first games to use Percentage Closer Soft Shadows (nvidia's whitepaper mentions this and has a comparison) which provide proper soft shadows with varying umbra. It is an easy method to implement and i'm sure we'll see many games using this (personally i implemented a similar method in my engine a couple of days ago).

Screen space reflections are actually done by many games, although i'm not sure about mixing them with cubemaps. Clever anyway.

PADM is interesting. From your image it seems that the displacement can only go "inwards" (which makes sense if it is only a pixel shader). I wonder if mixing it with displacement to provide a "low res" displacement mesh to fine tune it with the pixel shader can get rid of that limitation.

I think the distinction between CE3 and those games' implementation, is that CE3 has combined area lights, and penumbra. The area lights are actually reflected into the specular as well, creating realistic reflections. But Hellgate's shadows look good, and you're right about it being first. And yeah, the screen space reflections aren't that great of a deal, but the way they're implemented with cube maps is impressive. I remember using a San Andreas mod way back in 2006 that projected the screen onto a car to make it look reflective. I think the distinction between Crytek's SSR and others, is that it can be used on any surface, and doesn't have to be planar, because it is raytraced. Also that picture was just an example of bump mapping versus tessellation. PADM is additive, subtractive, whatever you want. This tech demo video at 1.09 shows it off nicely: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWvgETOo5ek Infact if you haven't seen it, the whole video shows off the tech I was talking about.

Absolutely not one single atom of this is new technology. Vegetation blending is just one of many examples of saying "lets add the physics-controlled tag to a higher percentage of game objects". The dynamic lights they showed are the dynamic lights used in every game with dynamic lighting. Yes, you can do dynamic lighting in UDK. You can choose to bake static lighting. But you don't have to.

Do you really think the dynamic lighting from Crysis will run on PCs that could not run exactly the same dynamic lighting in another engine? I'll give you a hint: it won't. That's why someone went through all the trouble of setting up pre-baked lighting.

It's bending, not blending, and vegetation bending isn't merely the rigid body physics that you add to objects in most games. I never said that this was new technology, but it is the best implementation, and yes Crytek did invent this back in 2007 with Crysis 1. You have RGB maps that determine the rigidity of every part of the plant, so it doesn't merely bend like a rubber tree. The distinction with CE3, is there everything is achieved with real time lighting, due to the ability to have real time global illumination. Where the hell did I say that deferred lights were unique to CE3? Also, if you use dynamic lighting for everything, and increase the number of lights, as I understand it, the performance grinds to a halt. Also, "Absolutely not one single atom of this is new technology,"? Did you read the rest of my post at all? This is the first time, a game engine has implemented things like that sort of displacement mapping.

No. No it is not. It's just (probably?) the first time someone bothered to tell the game to blend between two established methods. I hope it looks nice but thats hardly a revolution.

if you use dynamic lighting for everything, and increase the number of lights, as I understand it, the performance grinds to a halt

That is exactly what they are doing. That's all. This is what I am trying to point out. All they have done is set the requirements higher, made a few things a little faster, and jacked up the settings. This. Is. Not. New. Technology.

The last game I heard of to use new technology was Force Unleashed, with its frame upscaler. It wasn't pretty. But it genuinely had never been done before - in a game or out. You see, that's what new technology is like. It is novel, but not always successful. You cannot look at what a developer is doing in a game and say: that will be moar cooler, it must be new technology!

vegetation bending isn't merely the rigid body physics

So it's not comparable to the cloth, plastic, and other physics applications in Mirror's edge?

You have RGB maps that determine the rigidity of every part of the plant

In other words, it's another instance of simply requiring more calculations to be done. Again, existing technology. Crytek is just raising the system requirements. Nothing new.

everything is achieved with real time lighting, due to the ability to have real time global illumination... Also, if you use dynamic lighting for everything

The fact that you think those are not the same thing, tells me that you don't know what "global illumination" or "real time lighting" means. I'll give you a hint: it's not new. Games were adding caustics and screen-ray applications since the XBox. Sans 360. If you want to see a more modern application, look at the Frostbite engine.

Did you read the rest of my post at all?

I read your entire post. It was all hype. There's nothing wrong with that, I suppose. If it excites you, I hope you get a copy on day 1!

Most people can't get a detailed sense of what is happening even with visuals. I often see a lot of bickering on asset design, art style, and gameplay when these videos are posted. This video isn't meant to showcase those things, this is a technical demonstration.

Welcome to modern game dev. It really has to be fully driven home that everything you see in these games is a clever perceptive trick designed to emulate ray tracing with better performance. It's astounding what they've come up with.

In a way there already are. Check your latest video card drivers. Much of the performance gains AMD / NVidia have over each other in various games is just that the games themselves are made compliant with the tricks they have come up with.

As for baking something like that into a game engine... I'm really not qualified to answer.

I'm going to interject right here and ask, what is up with ray tracing? Is it actually used in games? I have heard alot about it like how it takes a bit of power to use but is it actually used in games? And what does it do for graphics? I really don't know what I am talking about here but I am curious.

It requires too much processing power, not to mention requirements are raising depending on amount of lights and other inconvenient stuff. At the moment, even with absolutely monstrous GPUs like GTX680, using "traditional" approximated renderer is the only logical way.

There are some obscure projects, engines and tech demos running realtime ray tracing, but it's either very low quality, used in limited amounts or demands exceptional computational power.

NVidia's Optix library is pretty cool. It's a real-time raytracing system built off of CUDA. I made a 3D Tetris game with it that got a couple hundred FPS on a GTX 480 two years ago. I don't know how well it would scale to large games.

We're actually a ways away from ray tracing still yet. You'll have next next gen to look forward to that, at least.

To make it simple, this is where, for every pixel rendered, a ray has to be shot out of the camera and traced. As this ray is traced, it has to test for intersecting with geometry. Once it intersects with geometry, it must estimate the light, material, and color as usual.

This differs from rasterisation, which doesn't 'cast a ray', but instead simulates everything, such as depth, shadows, and then sends them into the camera.

Shooting out of the camera rather than into may sound less intuitive, but it is, by far, more accurate... and way more computationally tasking. No modern games use it because computers aren't up to the task yet.

That said, for pre-rendered graphics, such as rendering a Pixar movie, it makes much more sense, because you can just let the computer do it's thing while you go grab a cup of coffee or something.

That said, for pre-rendered graphics, such as rendering a Pixar movie, it makes much more sense, because you can just let the computer do it's thing while you go grab a cup of coffee or something.

Even then ray-tracing is used sparingly and only when they must use it. ILM and most other if not all VFX houses currently only do ray-tracing for glass and highly reflective surfaces. Would be great to see render farms get powerful enough to ray-trace everything

Ray-tracing can also be easily extended for more complicated effects. You can do reflections incredibly easily, radiosity is also easy (but extremely slow). You can do more complicated things like refraction and airborne particles.

Essentially ray-tracing is a bottom-up process; like saying "this is how light works" and all more complicated effects arise naturally. Real-time rendering generally uses a top-down method; like saying "this is what we want to see" by approximating the ray-tracing behaviour.

Yup. Collision detection can also be made much simpler in the rendering process. We could go on about the dream of real-time ray tracing, but let's keep it simple, as this is /r/Games :p

The next big step in game engines is real-time global illumination. I can't stress enough how much that's going to factor into the next generation of games. The generation after that? Designers dreams of the 2020s? Yup, ray-tracing, no doubt.

I'm keeping a very close eye on this upcoming console cycle, as it'll influence a lot of what designers will do.

Nobody "bothers" with displacement on that tree. As you have seen, the dude working on demonstration got into material properties and added that effect to a tree manually, to showcase what it's changing in trunk appearance. In the stock game, that tree is not using an effect like that, obviously. But for purposes of demonstration it's as good as any other trunk.

I get more excited when devs say "we're making this faster" than I do when they say "we're making this prettier."

I'm sure a large part of the optimization is for consoles, but still--when he says things like "this is a lot cheaper to do with this new technique" and "we've made this much much faster" I get giddy, because nothing gets me more excited than efficient engines doing more with less.

Optimizations are extremely important, yeah. That's where CryENGINE2 tripped and got it's dick stuck in the ceiling fan. It had more or less impressive renderer, but it was poorly planned and badly optimized. Crysis 1 was not a legitimately demanding game and it's widespread use as poster boy of top-tier graphics is a disgrace.

CryENGINE3, in contrast, works amazing even on hardware that struggled with CE2, not to mention it's managing to maintain extremely close visual quality across all range of quality levels (in contrast with CryENGINE2, where low quality just switched out entire parts of the renderer, leaving you with horrid flat picture). CE3 is neatly optimized and not really that demanding engine, and it does not deserve the "high-end only" reputation it inherited from CE2. Well, not to say it can't give some eye candy - if you have the hardware goods, there are plenty of amazing (and still incredibly optimized) techniques in it to keep even top GPUs busy. But still, even on ancient dualcore AMD64 and 8800GT, it works great and looks amazing.

Edit: My-my, would you look at this, looks like I have offended a bunch of Crysis devotees.

welll it is still one of THE best looking games out there and compared to that it's demands to your hardware are "relatively" small. Crysis 1 is out for over 4(!) years now and still graphical top-tier.

However you could play it on high-ultra on a GeForce 8800GTX... over 4 years ago it was an over 500 bucks card... now it costs less than 150.

In those 4 years loads of games with worse graphics, but higher demands than Crysis 1 (e.g. Skyrim) were realeased.

Tl;dr: 4 years ago Crysis was extremly demanding... now compared to newer games it actually turns out to be a very well optimized game.

It's hardly "top-tier" these days. To name a few: very limited AO implementation (one of the first SSAO examples), complete lack of proper reflections, inconsistent materials (whole bunch of separate ways to render metals, ice, etc. chewing resources and giving you rarely blending results), inconsistent lighting with very limited amount of light sources (in contrast, new deferred renderer in CE3 supporting hundreds of lights in a single frame) and complete lack of any overarching control over ambient (in contrast with Environment Probes in CE3). Basically, it only looks decent if you dump lots of natural assets onto screen and light everything up with the sun. For interiors or other complicated cases, it pales in comparison with modern engines.

90% of Crysis 1 beauty comes from relatively good looking content, not from the engine. And well, even vegetation looks dated these days, - most trees and shrubs there were modeled before Ronny Mühle was hired and before they have switched to a different workflow, making vegetation from highpoly. High resolution textures save some stuff, but it's nothing that impressive.

Really, it's time to stop fapping to that game and considering it some sort of gold standard. It's nowhere close.

It's more than 4 years old. If the technology didn't get outdated I'd start to get worried. But the point is, the graphics and interaction with the environment are still unmatched today. A large part of that is due to the jungle environment, which not many games tackle. Far Cry 3 looked good, but didn't have all the physics and interactivity. Nothing else really comes close yet for a jungle environment.

It sounds like a lot, till you think about what's actually on the line here.

We're talking about a company with 638 employees. Now, of course, the vast majority of those are not programmers. More than that, the majority of their programmers are not engine programmers, but are specific to each game project.

Now I'm probably inaccurate with this- but you could estimate the people building this engine are numbered between 10 and 30(I'd personally think just under 20, if only because more programmers tend to make code weaker, not stronger). To be coding an engine like CryEngine, you've gotta be among the best- but even then, they're in the games industry.

That means, that for a $1.5m buy of the engine, you're getting 5-8 of the best programmers the industry has to offer, having worked on it, for over two years- and this isn't even counting what they're building off of CryEngine 2 or 1. In other words, you're paying for, say 8 of these guys at only $187k per year- and that's not counting tools programmers(the guys who actually make the fucking thing usable, and arguably are the most important people even if not the best- it's a very different, specific discipline), test builders, or the countless dollars spent on hardware.

All in all, it's a fucking deal. But not a lot buy it because there are other parts to the terms that can get a bit onerous- for one, few have hardware good enough to make use of even half of CryEngine 2's features, let alone 3. Furthermore, there's royalty payments that tend to go with a lot of engines, payment for ongoing support so you can talk to someone when you don't understand something or if something's going wrong, etc.

Great response, but I'd like to correct you about one thing: CryENGINE2 is actually not that great and it's not legitimately demanding, but rather poorly optimized. CryENGINE3 works amazing even on hardware that struggled with CE2, not to mention it's managing to maintain extremely close visual quality across all range of quality levels (in contrast with CryENGINE2, where low quality just switched out entire parts of the renderer, leaving you with horrid flat picture).

CryENGINE3 is a great, extremely well optimized engine, and it does not deserve the "high-end only" reputation it inherited from CE2. Well, not to say it can't give some eye candy - if you have the hardware goods, there are plenty of amazing (and still incredibly optimized) techniques in it to keep even top GPUs busy. But still, even on ancient dualcore AMD64 and 8800GT, it works great and looks amazing.

Oh, I'm not making claims as to CryEngine 2 being great. Believe me, plenty of things with it were wrong.

But generally, the hardware demand from the majority of games hasn't increased even near the rate that it was back in 2004-2007. The stagnation of the console scene caused a lot of stagnation for PC development too(since so much of it is dependent upon porting). In the process, even as meh as Cry2 was, it's still covered in graphical features(useless transparency models, etc) that just are not gonna be utilized by near enough people to justify the investment into the engine.

Yeah. But well, in my mind, the console scene only benefited the engine development, because what we're seeing is lots of impressive renderers being optimized to run on very humble hardware. That gives many people on PC an opportunity to enjoy great visuals, and in addition, gives enormous breathing room for high-end rigs to go bananas with very expensive PC-only additional effects.

I'd agree overall? But we're in a really weird time right now, where hardware creators are more concerned about taking current hardware and making it super small, and have low power consumption. Moore's Law is operating, but not at the consumer level it was before, and that kinda sucks in some ways.

In others, it's pretty awesome. There's a likelihood that a phone coming out this year will be twice as powerful as an XBox 360(processing wise we already are, but GPUs matter), and it'll be totally affordable.

Crysis and Crysis Warhead were Cry Engine 2. Parts of it were rushed and not optimized so it doesn't matter how good your computer is, it'll drop frames when you get to the ending levels on Crysis. Warhead had quite abit of the optimizations in there, but at the same time it was smaller.

Cry Engine 3 is Crysis 2 and 3. Wither you believe me or not, it is more demanding to render the city than the jungle. The engine and lighting and physics in the game is done very well.

People like to point to the console port of Crysis 1 and go, "OMG It was horrible compared to Crysis 2 port." They took a engine that was missing a lot of optimizations and made for PC, and ported it over to consoles in if I remember correctly in 9 month. They were going to lose some of the visuals and scenery counts going over to console, but they lost a lot more because a lot of the tech needed to be rewritten so it was cut.

Dear Esther really blew my mind. I thought it as done in the CryEngine for a while, the environments just looked too good. It's the best looking Source Engine game and considering how fiddly those damn displacement maps are in Source, it's a monumental achievement.

There are different versions of source. The engine that was used in Episode 2 took I think almost a year before the mod community go it. It was crazy night and day for some of the mods that took advantage of it. PVK2 was extremely good looking afterwards with it's update lighting and particle effects.

I think engine choice depends on many factors in addition to graphics. Ease of making non-graphics content (i.e. gameplay) is one of the things Epic shout about for UE, and most indie developers are probably not going to have the development muscle to go through their levels with a fine tooth comb to get the most out of these engines graphically.

Because there are a other engines with good deals too. Unity is free. Unreal Engine 3 is free to use for non-commercial and for commercial is free to use up until $5000 revenue, after that they take a 25% cut.

They do. Nexuiz is the most popular one to come out of the mod community. It's just got a high fallout like all mod communities.

The engine does have an extremely high learning curve and the asset pipeline has been getting better. You can make extremely nice machinima in the first few weeks, but it takes way more than 6 months to start putting out stuff that is extremely good quality. Custom animations still largely have to be done in Maya but now indies can use kinetics for mocap.

As a game developer, this engine isn't ideal. As an indie you can get 3 licenses right now, Unreal, Unity and CryEngine.

Right now, these engines are graphically almost on-par (Unity is a tiny bit behind, but will be ahead by next year because they have the biggest dev team) so you'll choose for the engine that's the most flexible, which is Unity and CryEngine is the least flexible of the three.

Not to mention the pricing, it's been mentioned that it costs $300k which put it out of reach for almost everyone.

You'd have to be pretty technically inclined when it comes to 3D rendering techniques for you to really get the scope of what they're showing in the video. Those tech previews aren't really meant for general gamers, but developers who were, might I add, gushing over the video.

Regardless, this video is a much more thorough rundown of what UE4 is all about.

That's because at the moment we're still console bound by the 360 and the PS3 so UE4 isn't practical at the moment and as far as engines go it's still rather new so it's more practical to stick with the UE3 engine that they are already familiar with for the time being until UE4 has been sufficiently explored and tech has advanced further.

Basically it crosses off a ton of wishlist items that designers wish they had, some thought not possible for a ways from now, and makes the flow between making changes and testing those changes as fast as possible.

Basically almost all the features he was showcasing were stuff that could be done previously for the most part but they were a major pain in the ass to do and they required a bunch of workarounds but with the new engine you can do all those things in real time with no bullshit.

I heard they dropped their voxel lightning solution recently. It saddens me if true. No real sources, but if so... sigh. It was impressive. I just hope it still will be available, even if on default not turned on.

One might ask "why" - I heard it's because at it's core they would need around 2/2.5TF for it and next-generation consoles seems to target from 1.2 to 1.8TF, just below the minimum; having that said, custom hardware may help there and maybe it's all just talking.

If you're talking about GI, it's definitely won't be taken out of the engine, just disabled if performance won't allow it. CryENGINE3 has the same stuff going with their approximated GI from the sun - which is switched off on consoles but works great on PC. There is no point to cut something out entirely based on limited capabilities of some platforms.

Don't know. Like I wrote(again, in the same post you have replied to) I hope it will be simply disabled but still available. Having that said, it is something that may change look of a game quite drastically so one can wonder if PC ports will have it enabled.

They have said for UE4 that there's 2 versions of the renderer, one for high end and one for low end, I'm not sure if it's that. One thing that could happen is that they could concentrate developers onto one or the other as makes sense commercially to support their licensees, or they raise the 'ceiling' of the low-end renderer or lower the 'floor' of the high-end renderer so they only have one to support.

It looks okay. But it always has this "plastic" look to it, that theoretically is just an artistic choice, but it's all the default settings which no developer goes through and adjusts completely, so all games using it look kinda sorta like that.

I like how the new CryEngine really attacks some of the biggest detail issues in game engines head first. The new lighting system looks amazing, the caustics effects are mind blowing and whatever that pixel-displacement thing is, it removes one of the last issues I had with how vegetation are rendered in games. It genuinely feels like a huge leap forward again, not like the 2004 and 2007 generation changes felt, but close.

The problem with Unreal Tech for me is the weight of objects. Every object in Unreal games seems like it is hollow to me. Don't get me wrong, the Unreal games look good but for immersion factor, it doesn't really do it for me. A lot of my favorite games use Unreal but when I see what Crytek continue to do, it makes me wish those games used CryEngine.

You do realize that you are talking about nonsense that has nothing to do with actual engine features? Object weight is configured by developer making an asset, not engine developer.

Please, learn the difference between engine and content. How good particles look, how heavy objects feel and how colored scenes are completely depends on developers.

CryENGINE 3 is fantastic (Crytek really got their shit together, as CryENGINE2 was really, really crappy in lots aspects in contrast), and Unreal Engine 4 is incredible too. There is no sense to compare them by looking at how particular assets in particular games were set up. Both technologies are extremely impressive. Though, some features of last UE4 demonstration are unmatched by CE3 (GI from every lightsource, emissive lighting, terrain system) and it's the engine that can truly be called next-gen.

Then maybe "weight" was the wrong term to use. After re-watching that UE4 video, I still see the things that bother me about Unreal. The way the rocks crumble and break apart still don't seem believable. There is something "off" about the way they react. The texture of the armor has a typical "video game sheen" to it. The environment as a whole looks amazing and I'm looking forward to playing games with that tech. I know I'm nitpicking but it's things like that I notice that take me out of the game. I'm sure when I play Crysis 3 I'll notice little things too.

Goddamnit, that's exactly what I'm talking about. You are speaking about content and content only again.

The way rocks break? Yeah, that's the question for 3d artist and animator who did them. Armor texture and shader settings? Well, some dude did that model, did that texture, and configured reflectance settings as he saw fit.

Also, keep in mind that UE4 development team is not developing a game. They have neither time nor resources to dedicate months to polish character design and other content for some presentation. They don't have art directors like major games do. The result isn't meant to judged from content quality or style perspective at all. The presentation is about emissive lighting, tessellation, terrain, GI and other features, content is completely secondary and just gives a justification to use the tech all over the scene.

With a dedicated team you can make anything on that engine. Want Battlefield 5 with maniacally detailed ultra-realistic concrete cracking? No problem. Want Minecraft 2? Go bananas. Space sims, Mario Kart, platformers and prison tycoons, whatever. Engine gives you the toolset and technology, without any sort of limitations on style or asset quality. It's a problem of developer.

I understand everything you're saying. These things that I noticed that bug me about Unreal Tech, I've noticed across all the Unreal games that I've played. It seemed to me that it was inherent to the engines themselves. Apparently, I'm wrong. All those developers have made the same choices in all of their games.

I'm not a programmer, I'm a gamer. I took programming in college and never want to see another line of code again. I'd much rather be on the other side and just enjoy the games. This lesson in engine school has been insightful. Thank you. If you see Mark or Tim, tell them I'm sorry I spoke out of turn about their product. I meant no disrespect.

In all honesty, the things you mentioned could be more of a result on things like that kind of materials are easier to make on unreal engine, and some more natural looking stuff just might take more tuning compared to cry engine.

What you're talking now is the "animation" part of the engine, which is more to do with how you do it instead of how the engine behave. Movement and animation is all developer (note: not the engine) choose on how they behave. Is that car light as a balloon? Is that rock crumble like a piece of cardboard? It's all on the developers hand.

The things that are shown here are the graphic and visual fidelity of the game engine, which is mostly done by the engine. Lights, shadow, lens flare, shaders, particles, and texture is what the engine is for.

The only soft bodies I remember from ue3 tech were the meaty blobs. I don't know much about the subject, but a google search revealed the udk ships with nvidia's physics, and a lot of their licensees use havok. I don't know if ue4 comes with a proprietary physics solution and if they showed something physics specific yet.

I'm just trying to say that the different underlying simulation tech may be responsible for whatever differences seramic was seeing.

That video has nothing to do with Crytek or CryENGINE development and the tech demonstrated there was done by enthusiasts using some clever rigging and programming. It was done using free public CryENGINE3 SDK that you yourself can donwnload and try. Fun fact: that SDK does not include core engine source code, so what these guys done never required any sort of deep access to the engine.

UE4 stomps CryENGINE3 in terrain department and lots of lighting tech, but unfortunately it's not out yet and won't be for some time. In the mean time, CE3 is definitely leading, yeah, - especially compared with outdated lighting pipeline in Unreal Engine 3.

Folks at Crytek are busy developing next-gen rendering update though (early versions are used in Cinematic edition of the engine), so I expect they will catch up to UE4 at some point.

P.S.: Also, the trailers like you have posted (and like Agni's Philosophy) are unfortunately very misleading for most people. Most people are just discussing and comparing the art style and amount of content in these trailers without giving any thought to actual, completely unrelated tech within.

No, Unity is dominating the Indie / mobile scene right now, they have a sleek simple user interface with friendly licensing options. Not every company can (or should) devote everything to cutting edge graphics. I've never used Unreal but I hear they are streamlining more for mobile now.

Unity is great indeed, and yeah, it's very widespread (even my work involves Unity for most projects). It's not about graphics, it's about extremely flexible structure and great platform support. Doing stuff simultaneously for Macs, iOS, Android and PC is quite easy with Unity.

Also, Unity is used in Kerbal Space Program, and for that alone gets +99 to respect stat. :D

Interstellar marines looks decent, and it's on Unity. Also, most Unity devs are indies, and they're often making mobile games. So yeah, it can't match the tricks of Unreal, but it's also not being pushed very hard most of the time. Unity just recently introduced DX11 support, and it's looking better.

Well, they can only look at what consoles can do (sadly, but it is how it is). Current gen just can't handle that. Last i heard the specs for the new gen are still not released, so it is a gamble to go in that direction.

Wow... that engine is incredible! This proves that the next-gen is going to be impressive (if not necessarily to you, definitely to me.) Think about this - we're at the very beginning of the next-gen - do you remember what early launch titles looked like on the 360? They were shitty! The fact that this looks impressive means that at the end of this generation, shit is going to be unreal.

The CryEngine has been pretty impressive even as far back as Far Cry, but who has used it? And what games have been produced using it? While I really enjoyed Far Cry and Crysis neither of them were really the kind of games that evoked strong emotion from me. Their other games like Crysis 2 and Warface seem to have devolved with smaller, more lienar gameplay that resembles arena style shooters, not the big open world games they could be. Imagine a Bethesda or Grand Theft Auto game running on these engines? THAT would be impressive.

Crytek may have this amazing and powerful engine on their hands, but they're terrible at making games and unfortunately the engine abilities are just too powerful/expensive for other developers to use who are making console games.

It takes a number of years for game engines to become popular and used. It also depends on wither the engine developers want to support other games as it does have a huge negative effect on their main studio.

Unreal started branching out to other developer studios and later consoles at about the time the Xbox came out. It's been a developer station first since I think UnrealT2k4. They actively promote other studios using their engine. They care more about licensing than brothering to make Unreal Tourney games.

ID took this route to compete using Quake 2, Quake 3, but after they got to Doom 3 ID stopped wanting to do support as it was taking too much time away from them making games. It's why Rage isn't really a licenseable engine, but now that ID is own by the big B, ID Tech 5 might be in the next Morrowind game and they don't have to do any support.

Halflife took to heavily populerizing their engine too, but failed to get much development towards console. A lot of games did license their engine tho. Still hasn't reach anywhere near the number that Unreal has.

One thing I don't really like about game development is that it's become so specialized. I've been focused on AI and animation for the last 6+ years. Rendering is a completely foreign concept to me and I have no idea at all what any of these new rendering terms mean. The last rendering thing I ever did was with the old school fixed function pipeline and a phong model ray tracer...

AI and interpersonal recognition. Physics and all of the possibilities within a world that an item can have and create. Think about a single drinking glass. You can fill it with liquid or semi-viscous solid, shatter it and use it as a weapon. put it up to a door and listen to a conversation on the other side. Throw it at someone to have them react at the incoming projectile. Tilt the glass to spill liquid on something. So many possibilities for just one item in the world. I hope, someday, that this will become a reality in video games.

Crysis was a pretty interesting experience. Yeah, it's nothing new far as FPS mechanics go, but the world was well designed and it offered some great semi-open world non-linear gameplay. Crysis 2, however, was just as hallway shooter. Still technically proficient, but with none of the fantastic level design of Crysis 1.

Crysis 2 was nothing like a hallway shooter. If you had actually taken the time and played the game, instead of just rushing through guns blazing, you would realize you had just as many options as in Crysis 1 to approach situations, although they meant more and were more diverse in Crysis 2.

What I don't get is why their primary game that showcases this technology is developed as a console game first and then ported to PC. You would think that you'd want to have all the screenshots, videos and gameplay showcasing the best of what its capable of, not decade old hardware struggling to render it on the lowest settings. Like when I played Half Life 2, that was Valve's showcase of their source engine and they made sure to showcase it in the best light possible. As for Crysis 2 and Crysis 3, you simply don't think of them as PC games... and this is the perception I think they want you to have and I have no idea why.

My perception on the crytek engine in recent years as a gamer was that it was just another multiplatform engine, not necessarily one that was capable of some really cool things (I'm not into the gaming technicals). This was compounded by crytek's past negative opinions of the PC platform and keeping their games exclusive to the garbage origin platform which is where all the other shitty console ports are sold that I avoid. Now I feel more like there's a lot of talent in the company that's probably being limited by EA's stupidity. Because my percept

I don't know where you get the impression that this is for consoles. Sure Crysis 2 had that feeling where they boasted about getting Crysis 1 tech optimized onto consoles, but this is entirely different. All the media released for this game is obviously from the PC platform, as consoles wouldn't have a hope of running all this. And yes, this is capable of some "cool things".

The reputation of Crysis 2 doesn't help. Dumbed down gameplay and tacked on multiplayer.

Also be sure to check out the main popular footage on youtube from e3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUwWvtCy988 (guy with a controller, graphics not looking nearly as good as this tech demo). It's basically more of the same with really small gameplay levels but large looking skyboxes and to top it all off, shitty call of duty style scripting.

So honestly, could you blame me for my perception? They've done some really shitty PR for their engine and this is the first video I've seen that's made me think of the CryEngine in a positive light.

I haven't played Cry 3, but just watching the video. The guy appears to have god mode on. You really can't afford to run in front of people like that at all. When he's getting shot, he's not losing energy so I'm pretty sure he's being all gunho because he's a cheater. Yea, after the helicopter scene, I know he's using cheats. The game plays like that, but it's a lot smoother and a bit slower.

You don't have to like COD, but don't pick on Crysis because both games have excellent gun controls.

I prefer this kind of presentation for a game engine. Instead of showing "stuff that we can do we that engine *(with massive amount of work and complicated things to do them)" instead he's showing "this is what possible with the engine *(and how we do it)"

I see people downvoting you, but I agree. The whole thing could've been a few minutes shorter if he planned out how or where he should've presented certain features. There were a few moments in there where he wasn't getting the results he wanted and kept going through trial and error until it was 'close enough'. I don't think the audience doubted the capabilities of the engine if the presenter were going to go through all the troubles of trying to show it, but I know I wouldn't want to sit around for 2 minutes waiting for him to find the perfect scenario and settings. A presenter should know these things ahead of time. Instead we got "Hang on, that's not a very good example. Sorry about this. Let's try that. No. Oh I know, how about this? Hmm... Oh yea!"

The most drawn out seemed to be the water reflection and lighting room. He could have showcased the flexibility of the engine and every feature he showed us in the video, without having to sift through textures. All he needed was to at least have an idea of what he was looking for. I respect that the presentation had a very hands on approach, but when people are investing their time to learn about your product, you should invest in some time to teach them.

Hey, it's not like I said the engine was bad. Yes, the features look impressive, but the bad camera capture + the frequent fumbling made it so that the presentation wasn't on the level of the Unreal Engine 4 presentation. See: http://youtu.be/acR4n6lJEdQ

It doesn't look like this presentation was intended for public release by Crytek.

No shit it wasn't intended for public release, the guy is admin of a Crysis fansite and they were invited to a community event. I'm sure they were still pretty happy they got the presentation, fumbling or not.

UE4 tech demo was very similar, I'm not sure what you have been expecting. Events like this aren't made for the general public, - as you can see, it wasn't posted in better quality on official Crytek channel or something. It's for attendees who knew what to expect and were ready to talk about the engine in this way.

Why would buy a "cry" game from Crytek and expect a good game? No. That isn't what the series is about. Stop having stupid expectations. You are expecting a linear equation to provide trigonometry answers.

It doesn't matter, this is a "cry" game from Crytek. Everybody needs to hold their horses and calm down. The series is about graphical showcasing, nothing else. You want good gameplay? Go play a different game. That's not what this series is about.

I don't think those 2 share the same engine. But yeah, the engine might somewhat affect the gameplay. It's like using crayons to do a painting. Sure it's up to you but of course it's going to be somewhat similar to what other crayon artists have done.

The people here complaining about gameplay are ridiculous. It's an engine demo of a game that has always held Graphics as one of it's main features. If you want gameplay only, please go play Minecraft.